New & Interesting Bike Campenaerts

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the best part is this innovative wrench appears to require a 5 or 6mm allen key to use.

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Question:
If you were to make a new threaded headset with real benefits, where would you look to improve it?

It’s all already been done repeatedly, I don’t think there’s anything new:

  • Needle bearings with floating steel races (Stronglight), or angular contact cartridge bearings (King was first here, initially by salvaging bearings from a failed company and then by making his own)

  • Make the locknut a tapered collet that expands against the upper race as it tightens. The Primax Misura did this with a pin spanner on a separate cone, and the King Gripnut does it with a captive 32mm nut.

  • Delete the locknut and make the upper race simply clamp the steerer. Chater-Lea bikes of the 1920s did this with a dumb bolt and nut, but were a dead-end monolithic tech tree all by themselves like Schwinn was postwar. The Mavic 315 and some other 90s models from Stronglight and Edco did this much better with allen pinch bolts in the upper race, which also let you use the allen wrench to spin it around and set the preload.

  • Replace or augment the upper bearing with a bushing or radial bearing since that’s the actual load there (original King, Nylfor, Cannondale suspension, etc)

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image

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His Rinko headset design is 48mm tall which makes it impossible to replace an existing normal headset on an existing bike, unless you had a minimum of 10-15mm of spacers underneath your locknut from not cutting your steerer properly

Even his low-profile version is 5mm taller than the classic Shimano cartridge bearing threaded headsets which I consider to be the platonic ideal

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Lol

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I’m always intrigued by locking threaded headsets. I went down a YST rabbit hole once and still remember this one:

There are a bunch of locking locknut 90s headsets, or? Onza and others?

That entire discussion is such a head-scratcher for me, because of how much the topic of ā€˜shimmy’ comes in.

I’ve only had shimmy on a bike once, the first time I toured when I loaded my high-trail bike with entirely too much stuff too high on the handlebars. Once I loaded it with a tiny bit of intelligence, it disappeared.

I’ve hit ā€˜car-like’ speeds downhill on at least four different bikes, from Snowaguchi to an Ibis Mojo, and never a shimmy.

Was shimmy something that afflicted whippy ā€˜planing’ early bikes that’s just kinda gone away, or does Jan just build bikes that way? Serious question.

Yeah I think planey bikes are far more apt to shimmy.

Someone linked to a mathematical paper that described a model for a bicycle. One of the cases it discussed was stability (no shimmy).

My search fu is not good enough today.

There’s no one single factor at play - it’s a combination of flexiness/natural frequency of the frame, steering geometry, how much weight is attached to the fork, and where that weight is attached. It’s not something we’ve collectively engineered out of bicycles in general, but it’s not something that hits ā€œnormieā€ bikes. IME it mostly seems to hit low-trail wigglebikes.

I’ve only ridden one bike that exhibited any sort of shimmy: my Crust Romanceur, which is low trail but not quite a wigglebiek. It’s not noticeable even ++50mph with my hands on the bars, but it will shimmy a little when i’m at ~15-20mph with my hands off the bars. When that happens it’s gentle enough that I can damp it out with a knee on the top tube.

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I’ve always wondered why no one has copied this, it’s a great design and surely the patent has expired?

yeah I was scratching my head over this. I don’t have a ton of experience with threaded headsets, but I was looking at his specs and then looking at my dura ace headset and thinking ā€œbut my headset is even lower stack already?ā€

the bit that gets me is that you can’t use the headset wrench without taking the stem off your bike, so you can ONLY use it when rinko/un-rinko’ing your bike.

And you can’t use the ā€œturn the wheel back and forth with the barsā€ method of checking how tight your headset is.

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or the ā€œgrab the front brake and rock the bike forward and back with a finger on the gap between the crown race and lower cupā€ method - at least not without 3 hands.

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Maybe you’re just supposed to epoxy it to your locknut

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now I am also reminded that they did this with threadless headsets, too: YST 1-1/8th purple threadless headset old mtb mountain bike bmx gt trek gary se | eBay

It’s been 30 years since I’ve owned a bike with a threaded headset, but I do remember that I needed a cone wrench and a lock nut wrench. That little spacer with the tab never wanted to stay in place.

Tioga tried to fix that with the Beartrap, but it still had flats for a cone wrench.

paid someone HUNDREDS of dollars to build me a fork that wasn’t threaded so I didn’t have to deal with that garbage any more :joy:

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Your hand?